Does Avebury’s collection of vast monuments represent ritual space, a failed civilisation or cosmic ordering?

Terry Dobney guarding Silbury Hill

A few months ago I was asked by my old FE College boss to give a talk to the Swindon Philosophical Society about the origins of civilisation. I spent the next few months obsessing over something I discovered I didn’t know much about. Of course it didn’t stop me having plenty of conclusions but that’s for another post when I pluck up the courage. I gave the talk a week ago to a small audience who were perplexed that I didn’t mention morals or existentialism once.

This weekend I took a walk with my partner Steph in the landscape around Avebury. It’s not the first time we’ve been there. Living in Swindon I think we must have passed it or walked through it a hundred or more times. But this time, coming from the Kennett valley into view of Silbury Hill, that massive mound of earth and sweat, I couldn’t help thinking once again about what it all meant and coming to conclusions I’d never really allowed myself to before.

Avebury’s remnants

The Avebury landscape, as seen now, is a mass of earthworks and erected stones. It’s beautiful but a little eerie. Archaeologists have dug over it with little intensity for the last hundred or so years. They have found pots, of course, as well as a few bodies, an assortment of flints and quite a few postholes. They have also given rather vague dates (which I hope will be improved) of around 2600-2200BC ish. All of these lack the spark of interest that the burial of a golden king would evoke. But unfortunately, much that could rot has in rotted the mildly alkaline soils of the chalk downland.

All of this gives Avebury a weird feeling – something that doesn’t make sense to us now. When you find a complex of big buildings, such as a shopping centre, you expect evidence of the great mass of people who passed through it – if nothing else all their litter. You also expect a Taylor-Woodrow or a king to have organised the building program. Avebury’s landscape seems to lack all that.  So people have tried to make sense of this weirdness.

Avebury story 1

The prevalent Avebury story is one of a small number of egalitarian, mythical ancient beings, on a higher religious plane from us. These strange and mysterious people carried out rites to control cosmic and earthly forces in this site of higher energy. They created a landscape of harmony with the Earth.

This idea is not new, I suppose. People have always looked for an Arcadian and better past. The only problem is who put in all the effort digging the ditches, stacking the mounds, moving and erecting the stones? Only the most extreme in their views would evoke the cosmic forces themselves to do the work.

Avebury story 2

Archaeologists are, of course, more rational in their outlook. Using the evidence of the pots, the bones and the stones they have evoked a slightly different world. Here was a strange and mysterious people. Theirs was a ritual landscape, one where people came to the area seasonally to worship whatever gods they had and to hold ceremonial feasts. In this landscape they built great ritual enclosures from wood, then burnt them down in symbolic acts to do with life and death and rebirth. Their society was a form of chief or priestdom, one with an unbroken tradition extending back to the Mesolithic and changed forever by the advent of the Bronze age.

Again, very nice, but who did all the work?

Avebury story 3 (mine)

The Avebury complex’s short peak on this Earth and its impressive monuments tell a simple story, repeated in many other centres throughout the world. Such monumental architecture, built over a short space of time, needs massive manpower to build. That manpower needs to have been highly organised, with division of labour to organise seasonal food supplies and food distribution. This is the basis for all civilisations around the world. In that respect Avebury is no exception. And that division of labour requires some form of wealth to initiate it.

What makes Avebury perhaps more interesting is that it was also a failure. This complex society never reached the crucial point of goods manufacture which turned such sites as Uruk in Mesopotamia or Erlitou in China into lasting civilisations. Why I don’t know.

How one chooses to read the past

The West Kennet Enclosures from the air (borrowed from English Heritage website)

The major argument against Avebury being a form of proto-civilisation is the lack of houses, the lack of burials of any kind, either wealthy or not, and the lack of fine art. In fact the buried evidence seems quite impoverished. Certainly their pots are not very exciting. I suspect that there’s much to be dug up and, preservation willing, more buildings still to be found. However, I don’t think it will necessarily improve the case.

But if we can’t see the large numbers of people that made the monuments of Avebury and we can’t see their wealth (whatever it was) that’s not because it wasn’t there. People’s methods of disposing of the dead vary from culture to culture. Likewise, sometimes they bury their wealth but often they recirculate it. Whatever, if archaeologists choose to interpret the huge wooden Wes Kennet enclosures just to the south of Avebury as being a ritual space and not an urban setting then I’m unlikely to persuade them of an alternative anyway.

Did the earliest major ‘pristine civilisation’ in South America, the Late Archaic Caral-Supe / Norte Chico culture, control trade in native silver from the Andes to the Pacific coast?

Peruvian coast, showing sites of the Late Preceramic/Late Archaic

The history of civilisation in South America seems like a minefield. So much has yet to be found or excavated. So much has been looted. Perhaps the most exciting set of developments here are the emerging evidences of two very early, ‘complex’ cultures near the Peruvian coast.

One, near modern-day Barranca, is known as the Caral-Supe or Norte Chico ‘civilisation’ (depending on who you read). It is dated from the late fourth millennium BC to around 1800 BC, reaching its zenith around 2500BC. The other culture, located in the Casma Valley 200 km to the north, is unnamed but could be called the ‘Sechin Bajo culture’. It is dated to the middle and late fourth millennium BC. Both of these fall within what’s known as the Late Preceramic or Late Archaic Period. Sometimes these coastal sites are assigned to a Cotton Preceramic Stage.

Caral-Supe / Norte Chico culture

The Caral-Supe or Norte-Chico ‘civilisation’ is represented by at least 24, and perhaps as many as 95, sites along four rivers, Rio Fortaleza, Pativilca, Supe and Huaura, around 150km north of Lima¹. The majority of these sites are located along the Rio Supe, the best known being Aspero and Caral. Other sites, such as Bandurria, in the Rio Huaura, and Cabalette, in the Rio Fortaleza, are similiarly impressive. However, Caral is still the grandest.

As well as sometimes extensive evidence for housing, all the sites have monumental architecture in the form of pyramidal platforms and ‘sunken circular plazas’. The platforms are up to 18 metres high. The plazas are round basins tens of metres across, with vertical sides up to 3 metres deep and steep stairs, perhaps good for penning wild animals. The reason why these sites were not recognised before is that the buildings were made out of adobe bricks. Thus the monuments have been reshaped over time into natural-looking hills.

Sechin bajo

This site was found only in the last few years when digging below monumental architecture from a second millennium BC site². Whilst similar in type, it’s not nearly as impressive as those of the Caral-Supe, being simply a repeatedly remodelled sunken court and low platform. However, it appears to predate the Caral-Supe sites by perhaps several hundred years. Current dating suggests that this site was abandoned by the end of the fourth millennium BC, just when the Caral-Supe sites were taking off. Not until the Ceramic Period, around 1500BC, is there evidence of new monumental structures at the site.Caral-Supe, Sechin bajo and pristine civilisations

Both Caral-Supe and the Sechin bajo site are currently the subject of considerable debate among archaeologists. This is because they do not conform to the expected pattern of how civilisations are supposed to emerge. For a start, none of the sites shows any evidence of pottery. This did not appear in Peru until it was adopted from the north in the Ceramic Period, around 1600BC. On the other hand, there is evidence for the growing and use of cotton.

Secondly, Michael Moseley has made a case that the coastal peoples of the Caral-Supe culture lived off seafood and did not farm. More evidence is gradually coming to light to show that centres further inland did practise irrigation agriculture, growing beans, squashes and sweet potatoes amongst other things. However, even if it were true that only coastal peoples of this complex society were living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle then it would be highly significant as civilisation is supposed to come after farming.

Regardless of this, it’s currently almost impossible to see what kind of society made these sites. The people in them drew few or no pictures and had no writing (although they may have had quipu – knotted accounting strings). They clearly dug ditches and built noticeable, grand structures, so they were organised in that sense. Perhaps they liked playing games with dangerous animals. But whether they were egalitarian, feudal, communist or capitalist is currently impossible to say.

Native silver

Native Silver wires from Uchucchucua mine, Oyon Province, Peru

I am intrigued by the location of the sites in both cultures. They lie at or within a few kilometres of the Pacific coast, mostly within Peru’s highly arid coastal strip. They are all at or near the heads of rivers 150km long or even less, which drain the mighty Andean Mountains to the east.

None of these features make the sites unique. There are many such rivers, and better, up and down the Peruvian coast. However, at least for the Caral-Supe sites there is something exceptional in the mountains beyond their rivers which might have been important.

Native silver has long been mined in the interior east of these sites. Mines such as Uchucchacua, Colquijirca and, possibly, Cerro de Pasco contained, and in some cases still contain, long wires of native silver within the upper, weathered zone of the earth. From the evidence I can gather this appears to be rare elsewhere in the Peruvian Andes. Uchucchacua is still the largest silver mine in Peru.

There’s pretty much no doubt that Late Preceramic South Americans were unable to smelt silver from silver ores. The earliest evidence for smelting (from lake sediments) indicates that smelting didn’t start here until the end of the first millennium AD^.

However, at Jiskairumoko, a site 800 km to the southeast in Puno dated to around 2000BC*, there’s evidence of an exceptional burial with nine hammered and rolled, native gold beads, . If Peruvians could work native gold at this time then they may have had the capacity to extract small quantities of native silver for working too.

Silver was a highly prized metal in later South American cultures. However, there’s no evidence of silver in any burial before the second milennium AD. This, of course, begs the question ‘Did early Peruvian’s even know about silver?’ I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The gold find from Jikairumoko is really exceptional. Metal is endlessly reuseable and is therefore unlikely to go out of circulation through burial as often as a carved shell or stone would.

If people in the Caral-Supe sites were acting as middlemen in a native silver trade from the interior to the Pacific coast then the people of the Caral-Supe culture may have been exchanging it, at least in part, for another luxury from distant Ecuador to the north, Spondylus shell, which may have been sourced by the contemporary Valdivia culture. Certainly there is evidence of Spondylus turning up in the interior (e.g. at La Galgada) by the beginning of the second millennium BC.

Discussion

Such an argument is highly speculative of course. It begs questions like ‘What’s the significance of the Sechin Bajo site?’. Perhaps more important is that archaeologists in Peru are really only at the beginning of understanding the Late Preceramic Period. There may well be many other sites of equal age and significance along the coast, just waiting to be found.

For example, a coastal site at Los Morteros, to the north, may include a pyramid that’s equally old if not older than those I’ve mentioned³. However, at the moment nothing of this early date quite matches the Caral-Supe sites in splendour and number, and I think that needs some explanation.

References

*Aldenderfer, M. et al. 2008 Four-thousand-year-old Gold Artifacts from the Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru, PNAS 105, p5002-5005.

^Cooke, C. A. et al. 2007 A Millennium of Metallurgy Recorded by Lake Sediments from Morococha, Peruvian Andes, Environmental Science and Technology 41, p3469-3474.

²Fuchs, P.R. et al. 2009 Del Arcaico Tardío al Formativo Temprano: las investigaciones en Sechín bajo, valle de Casma, Boletín de Arqueologíca PUCP 13, p55-86.

¹Jacobs, J. Q. 2000 (with amendments to 2008) Early Monumental Architecture on the Peruvian Coast: Evidence of Socio-Political Organization and the Variation in its Interpretation. (webpage)

¹Haas, J. et al. 2004 Dating the Late Archaic occupation of the Norte Chico region in Peru, Nature 432, p1020-1023.

¹Haas, J. & Perales Munguía, M.J. 2004  Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica en el Norte Chico: Excavaciones en Caballete, Valle de Fortaleza, Perú (report), pp103.

Olson, E. 2011 Geoarchaeology of the Salinas de Chao Paleo-embayment, Chao, Peru,  (preliminary report on fieldwork in the Los Morteros area)

¹Pozorski, S. & Pozorski, T., 2008 Early Cultural Complexity on the Coast of Peru, (or from here), in “Handbook of South American Archaeology” (H. Silverman & W. Isbell eds.), Springer.

³Sandweiss, D.H. 2004 GPR identification of an early monument at Los Morteros in the Peruvian coastal desert, Journal of Quaternary Research 73, p439-448. (there’s also a pdf available, try typing Sandweiss Los Morteros into google).

Were Sumerian speakers elite late arrivals in Sumer?

Votive statues from Tell Asmar, Early Dynastic Period

I found this unreferenced statement in the online “Encylopedia Britannia” article entitled “Sumer” (dated 9/8/2011)

“Sumer was first settled between 4500 and 4000 BC by a non-Semitic people who did not speak the Sumerian language. These people now are called proto-Euphrateans or Ubaidians, for the village Al-Ubaid, where their remains were first discovered… After the Ubaidian immigration to Mesopotamia, various Semitic peoples infiltrated their territory, adding their cultures to the Ubaidian culture, and creating a high pre-Sumerian civilization.”

“The people called Sumerians, whose language became the prevailing language of the territory, probably came from around Anatolia, arriving in Sumer about 3300 BC.”

There’s a simplified version of this statement on the Wikipedia page called “Sumer”. The statement references only the online Encylopedia Britannica entry just mentioned.

It’s an astonishing claim, showing a profound level of ignorance of what archaeology can and cannot tell you about prehistory. Certainly, there is a theory, put forward a number of years ago by a number of linguists, that more ancient languages than Sumerian had once existed in southern Mesopotamia. The theory goes that agricultural words from these languages subsequently became embedded in Sumerian. Much, but not all, of the evidence for this is now refuted.

But what seems odd to me is the statement giving a very late date for when Sumerian speakers arrived in southern Mesopotamia. I’m sure this must be an old idea but I haven’t seen it before. It may simply be a misunderstanding of some statement about the earliest evidence for the Sumerian language being from the late fourth millennium BC.

However, the following two points could easily be put forward in its partial defence.

Sumerian language

The general consensus amongst linguists is that Sumerian is a language isolate, meaning that there are no known ancient or modern languages related to it. As such it can’t be shown where, geographically, the language might have evolved.

When writing first appeared at Uruk-Warka during the Late Uruk Period, around 3300-3200BC, words were written in such a pictorial way as to give no guidance on how to pronounce them. However, by the Jemdet Nasr Period, around 3000BC, grammatical and phonetic elements started to appear which make it clear that the language being written was definitely Sumerian.

Evidence of an unrelated Semitic language, perhaps Akkadian, is also present from this time in people’s names and in unusual words. By the middle of the third millennium BC, just a few hundred years later, Semitic languages were becoming dominant in the area, and it appears that Sumerian as a spoken language was on its way out. After around 2000BC Sumerian was moribund, used only for liturgical and literary use, a bit like Latin has become for us.

The general explanation for this has been that Akkadian, perhaps nomadic, immigrants from the North poured into the southern cities from the Uruk Period onward. These swamped the population, changing the dominant language. Akkadian indeed contains quite a few Sumerian loanwords.

However, Akkadian lacks the mass of Sumerian loanwords that one would expect if its speakers were technologically inferior to Sumerians. To Piotr Michalowski it appears that, if anything, the boot is on the other foot; A high proportion of Semitic loanwords in Sumerian suggests that Semitic was the technologically superior language.

Michalowski also adds another possibility – that the Semitic language spoken in southern Mesopotamia was not Akkadian at all. If so, this would be problematic for the theory of incoming northerners.

Analogies

A couple of modern analogies might be helpful here. You could perhaps compare the rise of Semitic over Sumerian to the rise of Spanish in the English-speaking USA. However, Spanish has a long way to go in coming to dominate the US. Spanish is the language of an underclass in the cities of the southern US. The vast majority of the population of the US are showing no signs of taking up Spanish, and many Spaniards are becoming bilingual in English.

Another, perhaps more useful, analogy could be of the Manchu language in China. Manchu is a Tungusic language unrelated to Chinese. Manchus took over China and formed the Qing Dynasty in the seventeenth century. For about two hundred years Manchu was the elite language of Chinese royalty and Chinese administration. Because Manchu people represented only a minority of the Chinese population, the Manchu administration made laws to keep their identity and genetic inheritance separate from the Chinese. Yet the language sank in the face of Chinese in less than two hundred years.

Again there is much to criticise in this second analogy. Chinese already had a written history and an administration extending back several thousand years. Overcoming that would be a vast challenge for the Manchu. But, to return to Mesopotamia, if Sumerian speakers were the ones who had a written language first that should only have given them the advantage, an advantage that they still lost.

Beards and black hair

copy of cylinder seal from Sheikh Hassan, Mesopotamia, middle Uruk Period

The Sumerian elite called themselves “ung sang gig-ga”, or the “black headed people”. An Afrocentricist might argue this must mean that they were black but, to be honest, anyone apart from most north and west Europeans could make a good claim to being black-headed, in the sense of having dark hair.

And when it comes to hair, those of you who have seen cylinder seals of the Middle Uruk period will be aware that the majority of men in Sumer and the surrounding area are drawn without hair. In fact many Early Dynastic votive sculptures seem to show bald men.

Copy of cylinder seal from Uruk-Warka, latest Uruk Period

However, some of the seals of the Late Uruk period also show rare men with beards and hair. These are often more heavily clothed and they often hold weapons. They are also often drawn at a slightly larger size, indicating their high status. In Early dynastic times, votive sculptures of this hairy type sometimes show the remains of black paint on their beards.

By the end of the Early Dynastic period the fashion seems to be more mixed, with bald hair and beards on the same individual. Perhaps this is to be expected. But initially, these bearded men appear to represent a different, and higher caste. Were these the “black-headed people”?

Discussion – the Sumerian elite?

Copy of cylinder seal from Susa, Khusistan, late Uruk Period

Kingship in Uruk-Warka emerged no later than the end of the Uruk period, or LC5, around 3200BC, judging by the “Titles and Professions List”. However, academics have speculated about how far back kingship might go. Clearly, from middle Uruk times there is evidence of some kind of authority in Sumerian cities. This is again shown by the presence of apparently organised workforces on cylinder seals.

But is it possible that during the Late Uruk Period a foreign, warlike, Sumerian speaking elite imposed itself on southern Mesopotamian and Khusistani cities such as Susa and Uruk-Warka? Such an elite could have introduced to the southern cities new styles of dress, of hair, perhaps an interest in hunting and warfare… and its language.

Copy of cylinder seal from Susa, latest Uruk Period (note both sides have hair here)

This needn’t be a significant number of people. Uruk-Warka, perhaps the most organised and sophisticated city in the world at this time, could have absorbed them into its Semitic-speaking population (smaller Susa probably could have too). But they might have left a lasting impression in terms of kingship, fashion and writing.  The cumbersome use of Sumerian-based cuneiform to write Semitic languages such as Babylonian and Akkadian is a very good example of this.

If such an elite did take over, one could endlessly speculate about their origins. Evidence for conflict appears as early as the beginning of the fourth millennium BC to the north, in places such as Tell Brak, Syria and Tepe Gawra, in northern Iraq, as well as to the east in Khusistan. However these could be red herrings. Frankly your guess is as good as mine… but I’d probably discount England.

References

Encylopedia Britannica (online), Sumer (accessed 9 August 2011)

Wikipedia, Sumer (accessed 9 August 2011)

Crawford, H. 2004 Sumer and the Sumerians (second edition), Cambridge, pp252.

Nissen, H. J. Cultural and Political Networks in the Ancient Near East during the Fourth and Third Millennia BC, In: Uruk, Mesopotamia & Its Neighbours (Rothman, M.S. ed.), p149-179.

Michalowski, P. 2005 The Life and Death of the Sumerian Language in Comparative Perspective, Acta Sumerologica 22, p177-202. (online draft from 2000)

Ostler, N. 2005 Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, Harper, pp615.

Pittman, H. 2001 Mesopotamian Intraregional Relations Reflected through Glyptic Evidence in the Late Chalcolithic 1-5 Periods, In: Uruk, Mesopotamia & Its Neighbours (Rothman, M.S. ed.), p403-443.

Source of cylinder seal information and pictures.

Kitchen, A., Ehret, C., Assefa, S. & Mulligan, C.J. 2009 Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of Semitic languages identifies an Early Bronze Age origin of Semitic in the Near East, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 276, p2703-2710.

This paper puts a date for separation of Semitic languages around 3800BC, which is, frankly, too late to support the above story (it would suggest a date more around the mid 6th millennium BC). However, see the comments of Piotr Michaeowski on the complex relations of Akkadian to ‘Sumerian-Semitic’ in his paper, an argument that may indicate an earlier separation date.

Additional References

Nissen, H.J. 1986 The Archaic Texts from Uruk, World Archaeology 17, p317-334.

Now partially outdated due to availability of new texts and work currently being done in Berlin.

Potts, D. T. 1997 Mesopotamian civilization: the material foundations, Cornell, pp340.

Discusses early views on the Sumerian origins problem, including the idea of Proto-Euphrateans.

The recent publication of “Gathering Time”, which supplies much more accurate dates for events in Britain’s Early Neolithic, is a moment for any rational archaeologist to savour.

A new publication by Alex Bayliss, Frances Healy and Alastair Whittle, called “Gathering Time”, seems to me to be perhaps the most significant event in the last forty years in the understanding of the British Neolithic. I admit that I haven’t yet read the book as it costs a bit. However, what I know of it’s contents can be summarised like this.

Events of the Early Neolithic

The first farmers in Britain arrived in the southeast somewhere around or shortly before 4050BC, as evidence from a burial just by the Thames (the future Blackwall Tunnel in London) shows. Over the next 200 years farming spread steadily across the southeast of England as far as the Cotswolds. At this point, around 3800BC, farming exploded across the whole of Britain, taking just 50 years to reach far north to Aberdeen and far west to Cornwall (probably reaching Ireland at the same time).

At the end of this period, around 3700 BC, enclosures, often fortified, known as “causewayed enclosures”, started to be built from east to west across southern Britain, possibly parallelling simultaneous developments on the continent. Huge amounts of effort were put into building these structures over the next 75 years.

Yet, many of the causewayed enclosures were only used for ten or twenty years. By around 3625 BC almost all were abandoned (with the exception of a few such as Windmill Hill in Wiltshire, used for 300 years, and Hembury in Devon, used for some 150 years). Some of this abandonment was associated with violent struggle, such as has long been known about at Maiden Castle, an enclosure that was used for just 15 or so years. This same time period of building and abandonment also appears to apply to many long barrows in southern England.

Around or a little earlier than 3550BC a second wave of building and restoration of enclosures took place, only for these to be abandoned again within a couple of generations, also with evidence of violence. Following this, enclosed strips of land, called “cursi”, started to be dug in key locations across England’s landscape (although for how long I don’t know).

The Later Neolithic and Bronze Age

Although there is no publication date for any following volume, I understand from David Field of English Heritage that other, later peaks of activity are being found as well. Perhaps the most obvious is 1000 years later, between around 2500 and 2000BC (and probably concentrated in the first half of this), with a new phase of monument building, represented at its zenith by Stonehenge, Avebury, Mount Pleasant, Silbury Hill, the newly dated Marlborough Mound, Marden, etc.

A further event, with a concentration of round barrow construction, also appears to have happened around 1800 BC.

Techniques

The techniques that Alex Bayliss and her colleagues used to get these far more accurate dates are apparently not that complex or even that new. Existing high resolution radiocarbon dates were often used. These were combined with detailed information on archaeological context, then this combined information was entered into databases and processed using Bayesian statistical modelling software to produce most likely event times. Whatever, it’s the wide sweep of the study and comparison of data is what makes the methods used so important.

The beginning of real pre-History

Alex Bayliss has her own thoughts about what these events mean, which may or may not be correct. But what excites me is what this could do to British, and indeed international, prehistoric archaeology.

Over the last thirty years or so, some archaeologists in Britain seem to have increasingly gone in circles, producing no new evidence but more and more untestable theories on the cosmic views of Britain’s ancient ones. This kind of thinking is probably not good for archaeologists, leaving them with feelings of worthlessness and low self esteem.

And so it should. I can come up with my own made up story thanks very much. Indeed many of my posts are stories, but I don’t get paid to produce them. Perhaps some archaeologists would be better writing novels.

What this dating revolution has the potential to do is to start allowing a real pre-History to develop, not just for Britain but for the continent and the world. It would allow archaeologists to start asking “Why build then?” or “Why build there?”, making a testable theory and going back to look for answers.

It also means that more academically sensible people than me can start to follow on from the inspirational, but probably completely wrong, work of Gordon Childe and give the public a real sense of what exactly did happen in Prehistory. What I’d like to see is a bit less cosmic world view and a bit more “one damned thing after another” please.

(Unread) reference

Bayliss, A., Healy, F. & Whittle, A. 2011 Gathering Time: Dating the Early Neolithic Enclosures of Southern Britain and Ireland, Volume 1, Oxbow, p1100.

Is the distribution of round barrows around Stonehenge a glimpse of the first ownership and division of the English countryside?

The parish boundaries of Winterbourne Stoke, near Stonehenge, are defined by many features of the landscape. Often they follow hedges or fences, valley bottoms, roads, rivers and ancient earthworks, all of which have been present in the landscape for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It was these, after all, that were used to define the parish boundaries in the first place.

Unsurprisingly the boundaries also pass through large numbers of Early and Middle Bronze Age burial mounds, also known as round barrows or ‘tumuli’ (one is called a ‘tumulus’).

Most, if not all of these barrows date from a period of several hundred years after the building of Stonehenge. They are simple, circular mounds of earth, and contain (or contained) the remains of one or many individuals. The barrows were used by more than one generation. Usually there is an original central burial. Later, cremated remains or whole bodies are placed in pits dug into the barrows.

Often the barrows also contain ‘grave goods’, items which were either important to relations of the dear departed or perhaps thought to be useful to them in the next world. Some of these are spectacular, but most are a bit duff.

Barrow lines

The distribution of barrows in the landscape is not uniform. In Wiltshire (the county of Stonehenge) barrows are often clumped into groups or lines. Often they occur on or near the tops or ridges and near the boundaries of different soil types. They are more densely packed near monuments like Stonehenge. However, no hard and fast rules apply and it’s possible to find lines of barrows crossing valleys.

Distribution of Bronze Age round barrows (red) in the area around Stonehenge. Neolithic sites are marked in purple (S = Stonehenge, C = the Cursus, D = Durrington Walls & Woodhenge). Based on data from Lawson (2007).

A number of sensible suggestions have been made as to the reasons for their location and positioning.

1) Barrow lines were located by ancient trackways (like burials along the Appian Way).

2) The clusters were centred within territories of particular groups.

3) Barrows on ridges were placed where they could be seen on the skyline by people in the valleys or from key locations such as Stonehenge.

4) They were placed on the edges of usable land.

5) Groups of barrows overlie former settlements or encampments.

6) Barrows were positioned to reflect the religious views of their builders.

Most of these ideas have their merits. So I’d like to take bits of 1, 2, 3, 4 and even 6 to make my own story of why round barrows were placed where they were. But first I need to mention the people in them.

The barrow builders

The people who built the barrows are a bit of a mystery. Sure, archaeologists and amateurs have dug them up, examined their bones and their ‘belongings’. Yet no-one really knows how they lived their lives. Suggestions vary from farming to transhumance (local seasonal movement of animal herds) and even nomadism.

This is in large part because no-one can find their houses. As Andrew Lawson has rightly pointed out, whatever the house types that they had they have left little mark on the landscape and might have been quite flimsy and temporary.

Later, During the Middle and Late Bronze Age, there’s not just evidence of houses but also of fields (coaxial field systems), showing that people were then settled farmers. This pattern of landscape use hasn’t really changed significantly since.

The round barrow ‘fence’

Based simply on the observation of round barrow distribution and field systems on Salisbury Plain I’d like to add my thought (number 7) to the above list, no more or less valid. Were the round barrows an early form of territorial boundary marker?

Imagined territorial boundaries, using round barrows as guides, showing how they tend to avoid coaxial field systems but may cut across Neolithic features. (Don't tell me. I already know about the canals of Mars).

To start, let’s imagine that Andrew Lawson is right and that people at the beginning of the Bronze Age were largely nomadic or semi-nomadic but starting to settle. If the landscape around Stonehenge became (understandably) significant for them, either spiritually or economically, then they may have wanted to claim parts of it for grazing rights.

Centuries of disagreement between competing clans would be ‘resolved’ by petulantly marking out the boundaries of territories using their ancestors’ bones. The more disputed the boundary the greater the number of barrows clans would put there.

Making a prediction, this would mean that ‘barrow cemeteries’ could contain not just the male genetic legacy of one clan but of two or more clans where the different clan territories met. Conversely, other barrow clusters around an ‘empty’ area could show the same male genes.

As the clans settled and increased in numbers they would start to farm the valuable land they had defined. So field systems of individual families would start to appear within clan boundaries. These might be reflected in the coaxial field systems which appear to lie between round barrow alignments.

So what the barrows could represent is the beginnings of settled farming and the division of the land in prehistoric England.

References

Lawson, A.J. 2007 The nomads of ancient Wessex, British Archaeology, 93.

Lawson, A. J. 2007 Chalkland: an archaeology of Stonehenge and its regions. Hobnob, pp414.

What exactly is the evidence that Proto-Indo-European’s had wheels and wagons? And what is the significance of *k^wek^wlo-?

A partially reconstructed, wheeled toy from the Cucuteni Tripolye B2 culture

Wheels, it appears, are not that old. They first turn up, in the form of moulded clay wheels on toys, in Ukraine’s Tripolye B2 culture (dated around 3800BC). After this date there is an explosion of evidence for wheels across Europe and down into the Middle East.

So (just going back 500 years to be safe) wheels probably weren’t invented much before, say, 4300 BC then. Why does this matter? Frankly it doesn’t.

But for people who study or are interested in the origins of Indo-European (IE) languages then this date can get them quite heated. This is because there are currently two main stories for the origin of IE languages. These are that the original “Proto-Indo-Europeans” (or PIEs)

1)    lived in the Ukrainian steppe around 4000BC and spread their language through conquest using wheeled vehicles and horses. This model is currently championed by Jim Mallory in Belfast and David Anthony in New York.

2)   lived in Anatolia (modern Turkey) around 7000BC and spread their language through the spread of farming. This model is championed by Colin Renfrew in Cambridge and, increasingly, by Russell Gray in Auckland.

There are, of course, other stories, but even these depend on whether the PIEs had wheels or not.

The “wheel” related word list

Indo-European "wheel-related" words, together with the current or most recent distribution of IE language branches (extinct language branches are in italics). Based on the delightful Fig. 4.2 of Anthony (2007), but with additions and changes discussed in the text.

What’s important to the opposing groups is a simple question: Did the PIEs have words for “wheel” or “wagon” or bits of wagons? If they did then the PIEs can be no older than about 4300BC. If they didn’t then they can.

Most linguists in fact argue that the PIEs did have words for wheel. The candidates put forward nine reconstructed PIE word forms, selected by the them as evidence for the PIEs having wheels. These are:

• *hurki , argued to mean “wheel”
• *roteh₂,  argued to mean “wheel”
• *k^wek^wlo-, argued to mean “wheel”
• *k^welh₁-, argued to mean “turn” perhaps in the sense of a turning wheel.
• *h₂eks-, argued to mean “axle”
• *h₂ih₃s-, argued to mean “thill” or “wagon shaft”
• *wéĝh-, argued to mean “convey in a vehicle”
• *h₃nebh-, argued to mean “nave” or “wheel hub”
• *iugó-, argued to mean “yoke”

The aim of this post is to cast a critical eye over the linguistics of each of these forms using evidence available on the internet. I am not a linguist. Feel free to shoot me down in flames. I also have no vested interest in either story. However, I do feel frustrated when another wesbite trots out the same old cant.

The end of the PIE

One example of an Indo-European family tree, based on Atkinson & Gray (2006)

I should mention the IE branches which are important to this discussion.

Currently it’s generally accepted by all sides that the Anatolian language branch was the earliest to become separated from the rest of the PIE group. This branch, which included Hittite, is now extinct but it was once present across much of modern day Turkey.

Because the Anatolian languages are quite different from other IE languages they are sometimes excluded from PIE. Instead an earlier grouping is defined, called Proto-Indo-Hittite. For the purposes of this post I will include all branches in PIE.

Although there is some discussion, the next language branch generally thought to have split from the main IE group is the Tocharian branch. This is also extinct, but was present in the Taklamakan desert, north of the Himalayas.

After that no-one can really agree which language branch or branches were the next to separate off. Candidates include Celtic, Germanic, Greek and Armenian.

*k^welh₁-, “to turn”

This root is reconstructed regularly from Latin colus, meaning “spun thread”, Old Indic cárati, Old Irish cul meaning “vehicle”, Old Norse hvel, meaning “wheel”, Old Prussian kelan, meaning “mill wheel”, Ukrainian коло (kolo), meaning “circle” (corrected 19/6/11), Bulgarian кола (cola), meaning “cart” and Greek πολος (polos), meaning “axis”, and Albanian sjell, meaning “to turn” (Armenian sjel, supposedly meaning “turn around”, may or may not exist). The form seems to have resulted in a variety of different words although many, but not all of them relate to wheels and transport.

These words can be divided into two categories. Those such as hvel, kelan, cárati and sjell are all regularly derived from the PIE root *k^welh₁-. Those such as colus, cul, коло and polos are regularly derived seemingly from the PIE with ablaut *k^wolh₁-. Whilst this is a regular phenomenon it does, arguably, suggest subtly separate origins for “wheel” between, say, Old Norse and Russian.

Interestingly, Luwian and Hittite include the word kaluti, which seems to mean “a turn” or “a circle”. However, linguists seem to think it is not derived from the same root (presumably because it would have become something like kual-). Tocharian A lutk & B klutk, meaning “to turn”, may be also from *k^welh₁- but are irregular if so.

*roteh₂-, “wheel” (n)

This is reconstructed regularly from Latin rota, Irish rath, Welsh rhōd, Lithuanian rãtas, Latvian rats and German rad (amongst others), all of them meaning “wheel” in the sense of a wagon, as well as Albanian rreth, meaning “circle”, and Old Indic rátha, meaning “chariot”. The etymology is pretty clear and unambiguous and it would be difficult to put forward an argument that the speakers of the root language of all of these did not have wheeled vehicles of some kind.

It seems implausible that Tocharian A ratäk & B retke, meaning “army”, is derived from *roteh₂ as tentatively suggested by Douglas Q Adams (PIE *roteh₂- should become Tocharian *racä- as far as I can tell). Generally, it’s thought to be a Proto-Iranian loanword from *rataka, thought to mean “order” or “series”, although this itself has problems.

*ak’s- or *h₂eks-, “axle” (n)

This is reconstructed regularly from Old Indian ákṣa-, Latin axis, Irish ais, Welsh echel, German achse, Lithuanian ašìs, Russian ось (osi) and Old Greek άξονας (axonas) (among other languages). All mean either “wheel axle” or “axis on which something turns”. Therefore some relationship with a wheel seems reasonable.

*h₂ih₃s-, “thill” or “shaft” (n)

This is reconstructed from Old Indic īṣá, Hittite hissa and Russian vojë (among other languages) meaning “shaft”, as well as Old Greek óiαξ (óiaks), meaning “tiller”, and English oar. I admit to finding this PIE stem’s derivation tricky to follow. Regardless, its necessary connection with a wheeled wagon seems tenuous.

*wéĝh-, “convey in a vehicle” (v)

This root is reconstructed regularly from German weg, English weigh, Latin vehō, Bulgarian веза (vesа) and Lithuanian vèžti . Meanings are generally on the lines of “carry” or “convey”, sometimes by means of a wagon. In Old Indic its cognate occurs in váhati, meaning “transport”. It’s also recognised in Tocharian A wkäṃ and B yakne, meaning ”habit” or “manner”.

Words meaning “wagon” have been derived from many of these words. However, there is nothing to indicate that the original PIE root particularly signified carrying something in any form of wheeled transport. In the case of Tocharian, the link with wheeled transport, or in fact any form of transport, is non-existent.

*h₁wŗgis, “wheel” or “having circular form” (n)

Based on the PIE root *h₁werg-, thought to mean “to turn around”. This is argued to have descendants in both Hittite hurki, and Tocharian A yerkwanto and B wärkänt, all of which mean “wheel”.

However, to quote David Anthony, “Tocharian specialist Don Ringe sees serious difficulties in deriving either Tocharian term from the same root that yielded Anatolian hurki-, suggesting that the Tocharian and Anatolian terms were unrelated and therefore do not require a Proto-Indo-European root.”

*h₃nebh-, “nave” or “hub” (n)

This is reconstructed from Old Indic nábhya, meaning “wheel hub”, and many other languages including Greek omphalós, Latin umbilīcus, Old Irish imbliu, English navel, where it always means “navel”. Although it has come to mean “hub” in Old Indic, trying to assign any other meaning to the root but “navel” seems unreasonable.

*iugó-, “yoke” (v)

This is reconstructed from Old Indic yoga, Greek zdügo, Latin iugum, Welsh iau, English yoke, Russian иго (igo), all meaning “a yoke” or “yoking”. Other words thought to be related are Tocharian A & B yuk, meaning “conquer” and Hittite juga-, of unknown meaning, but possibly “yoke”. This word appears to have meant “yoke” as in to tie animals to something such as a plough or wagon.

*k^wék^wlo-, “wheel” (n)

This was originally reconstructed from Old Indic cakrá, meaning “circle” or “wheel”, Avestan caxrem, meaning “wheel” and Old English hweogol, hweowul or hwēol, meaning “wheel” or “circular band”.

Words also thought to derive from this root are Greek kuklos meaning “circle” or “wheel”, Tocharian A kukäl and B kokale, meaning “wagon”, and Lithuanian kãklas, meaning “neck”. Hittite kugullas could also derive easily from *k^wék^wlo-. However, its meaning, something along the lines of “lump” or “measure” or even “bread roll”, although unclear, is unlikely to be related to wheels.

The reconstructed form *k^wék^wlo- is almost ideal PIE. It appears to derive from the PIE root *k^wélh₁- (seen above) meaning something along the lines of “to turn”, by a process known as reduplication.

Reduplication in IE is where a verb is expanded, often to give a past tense. This might have produced something like *k^wék^welh₁- or *k^wék^wolh₁-, meaning “to have turned” (excuse my poor PIE). From this would come a noun, something like *k^wék^wlos, meaning “thing that turned”, hence “wheel”.

The chance of reduplicating a verb then turning it into a noun is reasonably high and may have been done many times in history. However, if it had been done by one of the descendants of IE it should have produced a distinct form, recognisable to an IE linguist.

Indeed, in the opinion of one such linguist, Andrew Garrett,  ”… such an account is hardly possible for PNIE *k^wek^wlos ‘wheel’ (in Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian…): though derived from *k^wélh₁- ‘turn’, a reduplicated C₁e-C₁C₂-o- noun is so unusual morphologically that parallel independent formation is excluded.”

This makes *k^wék^wlo- the flagship word for the wheelies. It would suggest that any IE language that includes a word derived by regular rules of IE sound change from *k^wék^wlo- must have been part of a larger grouping somewhere in the second half of the fifth millennium BC or later. Following this argument, as both Tocharian and Greek have words supposedly derived from *k^wék^wlo- they must have split from the main IE group after wheels were invented.

However, I seem to see weak points with this argument. Therefore it’s perhaps worth looking at the individual derived words in more detail.

Old Indic cakra, meaning “wheel’

This, word, closely related to Avestan čaxra, meaning “circle” or “wheel”, can be derived by regular means from a PIE form *k^wék^wlo-, via Proto-Indo-Iranian *kekro-.

It is notably comparable to some Finno-Ugric words, such as Finnish kekri, which have meanings varying from perhaps “yearly cycle” to “circular”. Although this raises the possibility that the Indo-Iranian word is derived from a Finno-Ugric language this is unlikely. Few, perhaps no, words have gone into Indo-Iranian from Finno-Ugric.

English wheel, meaning “wheel”

This is thought to come from Old English hweogul, hweowul or hwēol. PIE *k^wek^wlo- would develop into a form like *hwigwl. With the softening of gw to give *hwiwl this seems close enough to be reasonable.

Greek kuklos, meaning “circle”

χύχlος (kuklos, with a plural kukla, meaning “wheels” – NB the ancient Greek for “wheel” is τροχός (trochos)) is suggested to derive from a Proto-Greek form *k^wuk^wlos, although without explanation for the change of vowel from PIE *k^wék^wlo-. No standard IE linguistic rule can do this.

Sihler (1995) has suggested that “strongly labial environments” may change a PIE “e” to PIE “o” (a result of ablaut), which would naturally change to “u” in Proto-Greek. One of just two good examples of this is, of course, *k^wék^wlo- (the other being PIE *g^wenH₂- becoming Greek γυνή (guní)). So his preferred PIE form is *k^wok^wlo-.

Postulating the Proto-Greek form *k^wuk^wlos seems to be an attempt by linguists to explain why the recorded ancient Greek form was not *téklos or *péklos. For comparison, ancient Greek téssares or péttares (depending on dialect), both meaning “four”, are thought to be from PIE *k^wetwares. This makes the derivation of kuklos from *k^wek^wlos strange, although not perhaps entirely impossible.

Lithuanian kãklas, meaning “neck”

This word can be from PIE *k^wek^wlo- via Balto-Slavic *k:ikla-. However, it would be preferable to derive kãklas from *k^wok^wlo-, as with Greek. If the form originally meant “wheel” it has changed this meaning considerably. This could possibly be achieved with a corruption of meaning to do with, say, wheeling your head around, although this seems a stretch.

Tocharian kukäl (A) & kokale (B), meaning “chariot” or “wagon”

(NB The Tocharian for “wheel” is, as stated above, A wärkänt, B yerkwanta)

Kukäl and kokale are thought to derive from a Proto-Tocharian form, perhaps *kukäle. As with Greek there are problems deriving this form from PIE *k^wek^wlo-. The form necessary for giving the correct Tocharian should be, as Tocharian expert Douglas Adams noted, “closely related to, but phonologically distinct from … *k^wek^wlo- .” He suggests PIE *k^wuk^wlo-.

Alternatively, Don Ringe (2009) suggests the following, slightly tortuous derivation process (references removed):

“*k^wék^wlos > *k^wék^wlë > *k^wyék^wlë > *k^wyә́k^wlë → Proto-Tocharian *k^wә́k^wlë ‘chariot, wagon’ (with adjustment of palatalization in a reduplicated form; or is this just straightforward assimilation?); > *kŭkl ~ *kŭkla- > *kukäl ~ kukla- → Tocharian A kukäl ~ kukla-; > *k^wәk^wә́lë > Tocharian B kokale.)” (added 29/07/11)

This is because PIE *k^wek^wlo- would give a Tocharian form of *käkla- or, following the sound change laws to their extremes, *käśla- or *śäśla- or *śla- (c.f. PIE *k^wetares becomes Proto-Tocharian *ś(ä)twer, becoming Tocharian A śtwar and B śtwer).

Looking at it another way, *kukäle could be derived from PIE *k^wuk^welo-, *g^wug^welo-, *kukelo- or some other similar forms, but not obviously from *k^wek^wlo-.

On the other hand, the -käl- element of both kukäl and kokale could simply be derived from PIE *k^welh₁- (the form thought to mean “turn” mentioned earlier) without any reduplication. There are also other PIE roots which could give rise to the same element. For example PIE *k^wele-, meaning to “move around” or “drive”, is thought to have produced the Tocharian stem käl-, to “lead” or “bring”. This would satisfy the Tocharian form in kukäl and kokale.

Speculating wildly and unsensibly, the first element of kukäl and kokale could, conceivably, be related to the Tocharian word for “cow”, which is ko in Tocharian  A and keǔ in Toch B (probably from another PIE root *g^wow- through Proto-Tocharian *kew). Using this logic the words for “lead” and “cow” could be brought together in the Proto-Tocharian word *kukäle, meaning “cow bring thing”…

Well, perhaps not. Either way, while the latter is probably an unlikely derivation of kukäl and kokale it seems just as plausible, or implausible, as their derivation from *k^wek^wlo-.

The significance of *k^wek^wlo-

Looking at the words supposedly derived from *k^wek^wlo- it seems that all apart from cakrá and caxrem and hwēol require some manipulation of the PIE form. There is at least the need for a second, possibly ablauted, form, *k^wok^wlo- and possibly for a third (say *k^wuk^welo-).

At the moment I can’t help having doubts about whether such a word as *k^wek^wlo-, meaning “wheel”, ever existed in the original PIE vocabulary. It’s descendants, unlike those of *roteh₂, are rather scarce among the different branches. More preferable is that different reduplicated forms occurred, with different meanings perhaps related to turning, at different times. So, to contradict Andrew Garrett, parallel independent formation from derivatives of *k^welh₁- or *k^wolh₁- seems just as easy as anything.

Discussion – who did have wheels?

Certain forms, such as *roteh₂ and *h ₂eks-, appear to mean “wheel” and “axle” respectively. They seem to reflect a genuine, wheel-related origin and one or both appear in all the language families, excluding Tocharian and Anatolian. This suggests that perhaps wheels appeared after the separation of Anatolian and Tocharian. Greek and Armenian do not include a form related to *roteh₂. More debatable is whether wheels appeared after the separation of Greek and Armenian.

*k^welh₁- seems to be related to wheels in some, but not all languages. The languages where that relationship is clear do not include Hittite or Tocharian but may include Greek. This is similar to the pattern discussed for *roteh₂ and *h2eks-.

Some words, such as *h₂ih₃s-,*wéĝh-,*iugó- and *h₃nebh-, have meanings which do not necessarily require the use of wheels or wagons. Therefore their distribution in the language groups is not enough evidence for the use of wheels by PIEs. *hurki can be also excluded from the discussion as this form may well not have existed.

The case for *k^wek^wlo- seems more difficult. Regardless of whether there was such a PIE word, the argument that a derivative is clearly present in Tocharian is weak and even its presence as a derivative in Greek is not entirely convincing.

So overall I would say that a good case can be made for the presence of wheel-related vocabulary in much of the IE family, including the Italic, Celtic, Slavic, Indo-Aryan, ?Albanian and Germanic branches, which suggests that these branches had not separated by the time that wheels were invented.

The case for Greek is more marginal but certainly indicates perhaps some close connection of Proto-Greek with the other language families during the time that the wheel was invented. However, the case seems weak for the Tocharian and Anatolian branches separating from the other language branches after wheels were invented.

(I offer no opinion about Armenian. This language, like Albanian, has suffered from much loss of original vocabulary due to the influence of Iranian. However, for all IE language branches it highlights a problem – the lack of evidence for wheel-related words derived from PIE doesn’t prove that the ancestor language didn’t once have them. Nor can archaeology prove that ancient peoples didn’t have wheels.)

If what I’ve observed is true then the spread of IE branches from the Ukraine (or from elsewhere) after the invention of wheels is still possible. However, this would need to be without Anatolian and Tocharian (which has implications for the Afanasevo culture). It also allows for the possibility that the initial spread of farming into Europe from Anatolia could have included PIE speakers.

All this, of course, is only an opinion by someone who’s not a linguist and based on the limited information I could access. There are other lines of evidence, such as the IE word for wool (*h_2/3wlh₁-), also used to argue a late date for PIE.

However, from the information I’ve seen it seems that some archaeologists are happy to find the most speculative of evidence as support for the existence of wheel-related words derived from PIE, based on highly speculative discussions by linguists.

On the other hand linguists themselves seem a little complacent about selling their ideas to us, assuming that the illingual should trust them without question. This is not healthy science. I think they should sell their ideas better and explain to us why we should believe them.

References

Adams, D.Q. 1999 A Dictionary of Tocharian B, Rodopi, pp864 (see also Indo-European etymological dictionary (dead link?))

Anthony, D.W. 2007 The Horse, the Wheel and Language. Princeton, pp553.

Atkinson, Q.D. & Gray, R.D. 2006 How old is the Indo-European language family? Illumination or more moths to the flame?, In J. Clackson, P. Forster and C. Renfrew (eds) ‘Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages’, MacDonald Institute: Cambridge, 91-109.

Brugmann, K. 1891 (translation) A Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages, Vol. II Morphology, Westermann, p96.

Erkut, S. 2006 The Hittite Word kugulla-, Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi 25, p107-111.

Fortson, B.W. 2010 Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell, pp568.

Garrett, A. 2006 Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology.  In Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, Forster, P. & Renfrew, C. (eds.) Cambridge, p139-151.

Parpola, A. 2005 The Nasatyas, the Chariot and Proto–Aryan Religion. Journal of Indological Studies, 16-17, p1-63.

Parpola, A. 2007 Proto-Indo-European speakers of the Late Tripolye culture as the inventors of wheeled vehicles: Linguistic and archaeological considerations (unpublished?)

Quiles, C. & Lopez-Mechero, F. 2009 A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition: Language and Culture

Wikipedia – Indo-European Sound Laws (online resource)

Indo-European etymological dictionary, Leiden (online resource) (dead link?)

Starostin, S. Tower of Babel (online resource)

Early Indo-European Online, University of Texas

Supplementary References

Murphy, M. 2009 Olszanica 6: A Sledge Shed? Theoretical Structural Archaeology post

Ringe, D. 2009 Inheritance vs. lexical borrowing: some Indo-European cases, (online, accessed 28/6/11)

(An important reference detailing the suggested derivation of words from  *k^wek^wlo-)

Notes

Figure 4.2 of David Anthony’s book indicates that the Tocharian languages include words derived from *h₂ih₃s- and *ak’s-. However, he does not provide evidence for what these words are and I can’t find evidence of them recorded anywhere else. Furthermore, an earlier version of the diagram from 1995 does not indicate the existence of such words so I’m not sure what their status is. It’s possible that, like *roteh₂, these are not generally accepted derivations.

From further reading I think I might be wrong with this post. Sites such as the walled Tell Maghzalia (levels 13-14) near the upper Tigris, which date to perhaps 6000bc (around 7000BC), suggest that walls were necessary here long before I’d thought here. Other early walled sites include Tell es-Sawwan III (5200bc – around 6200BC) and Hacilar I and II,  Turkey (around 5000bc – 6000BC). Also, burning at Can Hasan 3, Turkey and, more particularly burning and bodies at Mersin XX, Turkey, around 4800bc (5800BC) make a perhaps stronger case for earlier violence.

What was happening in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Europe and the Near East between 5500BC and 3500BC to make it an apparently much more violent place? Are foragers to blame?

Gebel el Arak knife, Naqada III period, Egypt

I feel there’s something I’m missing here.

Read most books about the prehistory of Europe and the Near East and they will mention various key moments, such as the dawn of agriculture, the first smelting of copper and the beginning of iron-working.

One such event is the ’secondary products revolution’. This is the late Andrew Sherratt’s idea that around the beginning of the fourth millennium BC many innovations were introduced into European society from the Middle East, including wool sheep, dairying, carts and perhaps even horses.

To be honest the dating of many of these innovations is in some flux and some of these innovations are likely to turn out to be much older (e.g. dairy farming). Yet to say that this was the big event of the time seems to be ignoring the elephant in the room. For something else seems to be going on with the farmers of both Europe and the Near East that appears to have had a profound effect – the spread of violence.

What evidence can be used to indicate violence?

Four lines of evidence could potentially indicate violence. These are: 1) signs of deliberate wounding on buried individuals, 2) the presence of fortifications such as walls and ditches around settlements, 3) extensive burning layers at settlements, and 4) pictorial or written records of violence. While the evidence for 1 and 4 is fairly unequivocal when trying to spot violence, the evidence for 2 and 3 is much more questionable.

Fortification is increasingly being recognised for what it is in archaeology. However, there are enclosures and ditches which have nothing to do with defence and never did, for example drainage ditches, livestock enclosures or terraces. Therefore the evidence for defensive purpose needs to be clear.

As for burning this is much more complicated. There is evidence for burning in many sites across Europe and the middle east. Small scale burning, say of an individual building, cannot really be blamed on violence. However, even large scale conflagrations of whole towns can happen easily without conflict. Some even argue for the ritual burning by people of their own buildings and towns. While I can believe in individual houses being burnt for religious reasons I admit I struggle more with the idea of ritually burning a whole settlement.

The strange calm of the Near East Neolithic (9000-5500BC)

Neolithic Jericho, in modern Palestine is perhaps the earliest town anywhere in the world, dated to somewhere before 8000BC. This was in the Pre-pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) at a point when farming was not yet a full-time occupation.

At this time the town had a wall. This would not be much of a surprise to anyone who knows his or her Bible, although it’s actually some six or seven thousand years before the trumpety events described there. Strangely, there are many archaeologists who would rather that this early version of Jericho had no walls.

Why? Because it doesn’t fit. Current evidence suggests that there was nothing like it in the Near East or Europe for another 3000 years. It seems to be pretty much the only wall that anybody knows of in the early Neolithic. It stands out so oddly in the context of the times that Ofer Bar Yosef has argued perhaps it’s only defensive purpose was to keep the river out. Perhaps he’s right. Whatever, the next set of walls at Jericho date to the end of the fourth millennium BC, a point to which I shall return.

Zoot forward a thousand or so years, to Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, and you would find a huge settlement with perhaps eight thousand inhabitants. All of them lived in box-like houses with entrances through the roof, these houses crammed in like sardines. Yet so far no evidence of a wall has shown up. People have made excuses for this, saying that perhaps the packed nature of the town was defensive. Maybe, but it’s certainly not a defence technique used in later times.

Hunting scene from Çatalhöyük

Also, while the paintings on the walls of this settlement do include scenes of violence and manliness, the conflict seems to be between man and beast. There are scenes of hunting and scenes of animals picking over dead people. But there are no scenes (as far as I know) depicting people fighting each other.

In fact there seems to be little evidence for violence either in these early Neolithic settlements nor in the bones of the buried. To quote one recent paper^, discussing the Levant:

“This lack of fortifications around settlements is especially striking given the tendency throughout the PPNB period [8500-6000 BC] toward rapid population growth and settlement nucleation—factors that should, it would seem, encourage raiding and warfare.”

I’m not saying that people didn’t kill each other – I’m sure they did. A Neolithic Miss Marple would probably have been kept quite busy enough. I’m just saying that killing didn’t seem to happen on a large scale. Furthermore, if people did kill each other they chose not to be proud enough to paint it on their walls.

Mesolithic violence

It is perhaps worth comparing this situation with that of contemporary Mesolithic Europe. Lepenski Vir and Schela Cladovei, in Serbia, the Balkans, have evidence of occasional (but not common) trauma in individuals resulting from occasional violent interactions. Dates are largely, but not exclusively, from before the arrival of farmers to the area sometime in the late seventh millennium BC.

However to the north, in Germany, there is evidence for a pre-farming massacre in Ofnet Cave, dated to around 6200BC. Other evidence, albeit more limited, has also been cited for Mesolithic violence in Europe (e.g. in Denmark). However, much of this is from the later Mesolithic.

Something nasty in the Chalcolithic (5500-3500BC)

The first settlers into Europe appeared to take more precautions than their Near Eastern equivalents, although the significance of these precautions has been disputed. The Tavoliere Plain in southeastern Italy has evidence of largish settlements (e.g. Passo di Corvo) surrounded by ditches which date perhaps to the mid sixth millennium. Also Nea Nikomedeia in Macedonia, dated to around 5800BC, has similar features. Whether these are defensive is difficult to say.

Perhaps these precautions were wise. Nearing the end of the sixth millennium BC something horrible happened in Germany, Austria, France and Italy. A kind of ‘institutionalised’ violence appeared within the farming community, resulting in incidents of maiming, killing and probably cannibalism on a relatively large scale (e.g. burials at Talheim, Schletz-Asparn, Vaihingen, Herxheim and Fontbrégoua Cave). There is also evidence of trauma in burials from Liguria in Italy, perhaps dating to the sixth millennium BC (although exact dates are difficult to find).

Around the same time clearly defensive palisades started to appear around settlements on the North European plain from the Balkans to the North Sea coast (as detailed by Lawrence Keeley). By the early to mid fifth millennium BC fortified settlements such as at Dimini were appearing across the Greek mainland and the Balkans. By the late fifth millennium BC these kinds of defences, with extensive evidence of burning, were present as far east as the Pontic Steppe (Tripolye 1B).

In the far west, Britain shows burial evidence of violent conflict from the beginnings of farming, around 4000BC. Evidence of burials containing frequent arrow wounds also occurs in Spain by the fourth millennium BC.

To the south east in southern Iran, around the beginning of the fifth millennium BC, there is evidence of burning and desertion at Chogha Mish, and there is also evidence for burning at Susa around the end of the millennium (although either or both of these may be chance events). By the first half of the fourth millennium BC settlement fortifications were being built as far east as the Kopet Dag in Turkmenistan (KD5).

By 3600 BC burial evidence indicates organised and violent conflict at Tell Brak and Hamoukar in Syria. Slightly earlier, around 4200 BC, there seems to have been violent attack at settlements like Tepe Gawra (XII) in northern Iraq.

Seal from Choga Mish, late 4th millennium BC, depicting a siege

In southern Iraq, Uruk period cylinder seals of the late fourth millennium BC show, for the first time, what appear to be pictures of captives and slaughter. Similarly, by the second half of the fourth millennium BC in Egypt, Naqada III period palettes again show scenes of human captivity and slaughter (e.g. the Gebel el-Araq knife, the Narmer Palette) unlike anything seen before.

For comparison – prestige in the Chalcolithic (5000-2500BC)

A much less detailed story can be told of changes in burial patterns to include elite burials. Elite burials are those where an individual is buried with too much valuable stuff to be tasteful.* Burials in the Early Neolithic were not elite. They often show evidence of ritual. However, they contain either just the body or the body with occasional personal items or tokens.

Around the turn of the fifth millennium BC elite burials appeared in Eastern Europe (e.g. Varna in Bulgaria) and in the Pontic Steppe (e.g. Khvalynsk). These consisted of abundant copper and gold, and usually contained weapons.

By way of comparison, what might be called ‘prestige’ burials have also been found in Sudan, dating to the fifth millennium BC (e.g. 12). These contain what would have been considered valuable coloured stones. Like the burials above they occur within extensive mixed cemeteries and are thought to be associated with pastoralists. However, they are not elite, in the same way as those of Europe.

By the beginning of the fourth millennium BC elite burials had spread to Syria (e.g. Tepe Gawra) and by the end of the millennium to Egypt. Not until the third millennium BC is there concrete evidence of kingship and elite burials in southern Iraq.

In the west of Europe a similar, though delayed, pattern is seen, with elite burials spreading across the north European plain between 3500 and 3000 BC and reaching Spain and Britain in the middle of the third millennium BC.

Overall this pattern is similar to that of the spread of violence but appears to be later. It’s earliest manifestations also seem to be located in different places, to the east and, perhaps, to the far south. It may, therefore, have different causes.

Long term consequences

If what the evidence of violence suggests is a real effect (and this is a VERY big if), then it seems to come at a crucial time in the development of Near Eastern societies. The beginning of the Uruk period, around the end of the fifth millennium BC, is when Urbanisation took effect in Iraq and Syria. While this appears to predate the evidence for violence this could simply be a result of missing data. However, it may not.

The existence of temples in southern Iraq dates back to the Ubaid period in the sixth millennium BC. On the other hand the earliest evidence for kings in southern Iraq does not appear until the end of the Uruk period, perhaps a little before 3000 BC. Is it possible that the emergence of kings resulted from introducing warfare into an economic system which was ticking along quite happily already? A similar idea could be extended to Egypt or Iran.

The advent of high status individuals and violence in such a changed society might have had a very damaging effect on trading systems, closing down existing routes. Of course, a new demand for high value items, often taken out of circulation in burials, may have stimulated trade too. There is much for discussion here. However, that is for a different post.

Why violence then and there?

There are a number of possible reasons why such a rise in violence could have occurred over the period in question. Some are outlined below.

The case for Marxist revolution

A revolution resulting from inequalities in the system is possible but unlikely. One of the main observations of Early Neolithic life is the lack of inequality observed in settlements. In fact, inequality seems only to have increased by the end of this period.

The case for copper economics

From the late sixth millennium BC onward copper started to be smelted in the Balkans. Significant copper smelting was taking place here from the fifth millennium. At the same period copper smelting also started in Iran.

One reason for the spread of warfare and prestige may have been an increase in demand for high status goods among farming or non-farming peoples. However, high value goods from the Early Neolithic, such as obsidian and native copper, do not appear to have driven the same effect.

Alternatively, the smelting of copper could have changed the economic conditions of peripheral locations such as Germany and France for the worse, resulting in violence.

The case for climate

David Anthony has argued that the increase in violence in the Balkans around the later fifth millennium BC was due to coming out of the Holocene Climatic Optimum. However, the climate data appear to me to show that Eastern Europe was at the peak of the HCO at the time. If anything, the weather was getting warmer in Germany during its troubles in the late sixth millennium BC.

On the other hand, from about the beginning of the fourth millennium BC there was increasing aridity in southern regions such as Egypt, Iraq and Arabia. Such aridity could, as argued by Robert Carneiro, lead to warfare and the rise of military leaders.

The case for invasion

This is a tricky one. The obvious question should be “who were the invaders?” They might have been the Indo-Europeans, with more agressive “male-dominated” tendencies than the existing populations, as advocated by Marija Gimbutas and others. The current preferred homeland of such invaders is the Pontic Steppe, north of the Black Sea, where a prestige culture seemed to be emerging at the beginning of the fifth millennium BC. However, some of the dates here are simply too early for their models. Additionally, evidence from Germany at least suggests that groups of farmers were fighting each other before this time without external help, so such an idea wouldn’t work for everything.

The case for foragers

The spread of warfare seems to have started not in the Middle East’s farming heartland, as might be expected, but on the periphery of the farming world, particularly in Europe. This is where farming met foraging. Genetic studies suggest a significant or dominant component of the genes surviving in northern Europe come from forager stock, especially those on the female side. Forager societies have a poor reputation for violence, both within and between groups. It is possible that the incorporation of foragers into farming societies tipped the balance to more violent societies.

The case for the ‘Secondary products revolution’

The increased possibilities opened up by using animals for dairying, wool or blood probably created the first fully pastoralist societies. Perhaps the infiltration of these pastoralists into existing farming societies created an increase in tension and violence. Whatever, there is no evidence for fully pastoralist cultures in Northern Europe when the earliest violence took place, nor for several hundred years afterward.

Foragers, farmers, economics and the secondary products revolution

There are, of course, many other possibilities: for example a shortage of females in society leading to aggression, improved weapons technologies or just a change in habits. You may be able to think of many others. If I were to make a guess as to what was happening I would probably suggest a mix of elements from the above list. What they were I couldn’t say. However I am, of course, prepared to make a wild guess.

A wild guess

Early farmers of the Near East were ‘domesticated’ to be non-agressive to other groups. Unlike the forager populations around them aggression between groups was something that was selected against (see ‘Domesticing humans by artificial selection‘). Due to rapid population expansion in these farming populations the Near East became dominated by relatively non-agressive farmers until around 5000 BC.

When farming, and farmers, expanded into Europe, some farmer’s sons settled in frontier areas where they took wives from the local forager populations (e.g. in northwestern Europe). In other areas foragers were acculturated to partial forms of farming such as pastoralism, involving herding of animals, using the new techniques of milking and blood letting (e.g. in the eastern Balkans and Pontic Steppe).

Such actions led to a crisis when high prestige or improved technology goods started to become available in the Balkans and beyond. Aggression and competition now became a notable influence in these marginal farmer and forager-farmer populations. Through limited invasion, multiplied by the ‘founder effect’ (the tendency of strong males to have many offspring), these mixed forager-farmer genes spread back into the Near East. This caused a fundamental change in society towards something more warlike, where warring elites and prestige might arise out of the new conditions.

This explanation is glib, old fashioned, simplistic, sounds a bit Nazi and is probably plain wrong. However, I think some thought needs to be given to the events of this period as something’s going on, particularly in the Near East, which I feel is being ignored.

Notes

*The earliest phase of what could be called ‘elite’ burials comes from the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, in a period often called the Gravettian, around 26,000 BC (which really deserves a post of its own). Burials of what appear to be special individuals occur in places such as northern Italy (e.g. ‘Il Principe’ from Arene Candide), the Czech Republic (e.g. Brno 2) and Russia (e.g. Sungir). The valuable stuff in these cases consisted of abundant shell or ivory beads. Some might understandably argue that this is not valuable stuff at all. However, it probably was for the time. Such burials were, as far as I can tell, less common throughout the remainder of the Palaeolithic and were pretty much non-existent in the early Neolithic farming communities of the  Near East and Europe.

References

Alizadeh, A. 2008 The Development of a Prehistoric Regional Center in Lowland Susiana, Southwestern Iran.

Bocquentin, F. & Bar Yosef, O. 2004 Early Natufian remains: evidence for physical conflict from Mt. Carmel, Israel. Journal of Human Evolution 44, 19-23.

Davis, B.A.S. et al. 2003 The temperature of Europe during the Holocene reconstructed from pollen data, Quaternary Science Reviews 22, p1701-1716.

Keeley, L. 1997 Frontier Warfare in the Early Neolithic, In: Martin D.L. & Frayer, D.W (eds) “Troubled Times: violence and warfare in the past”, OPA, p303-320.

Keeley, L. Database of linear band keramic defence sites. http://www.uic.edu/depts/anth/faculty/keeley.html

Le Bras-Goude G. 2010 New radiocarbon dates and isotope analysis of Neolithic human and animal bone from the Fontbrégoua Cave (Salernes, Var, France). Journal of Anthropological Science 88, p167-78.

Márquez, B. 2010 Projectile points as signs of violence in collective burials during the 4th and the 3r millennia cal. BC in the North-East of the Iberian peninsula, Digital.CSIC, p321-325.

Parker, A.G. 2006 A record of Holocene climate change from lake geochemical analyses in southeastern Arabia, Quaternary Research 66, p465-476.

^Parkinson, W. A.  & Duffy, P.R. 2007 Fortifications and Enclosures in European Prehistory: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, Journal of Archaeological Research 15, p97-141.

Perlès, C. 2001  The early Neolithic in Greece: the first farming communities in Europe,  Cambridge, pp370.

Pettitt, P.B. et al.2003  The Gravettian burial known as the Prince (“Il Principe”): new evidence for his age and diet

Roksandic, M. 2006 Violence in the Mesolithic, Documenta Praehistorica 33, p165-182.

Rothman, M.S. 2001 Tepe Gawra: the evolution of a small, prehistoric center in northern Iraq, University of Pennsylvania, pp460. (p75)

David Wengrow’s book is a fascinating gem of ideas about the Bronze age Near East, although I’m not sure if I understood it.

Trying to understand the thoughts of another person is always difficult. Some people are less ambiguous than others. Sometimes the ambiguity in their ideas makes you think more than you would have if you’d understood exactly what they meant. David Wengrow’s “What Makes Civilization?” definitely falls into the ‘ambiguous’ category and is possibly all the better for it.

The book is essentially an essay about the economic and ritual life of Near Eastern ‘civilised’ societies in the third millennium BC. It is well written, highly readable and completely gripping. I read it quickly and found much of the little insights fascinating. Many little threads had me boring my partner with the wonder of it all. And yet by the time I got to the end I had no real idea what the book had to do with the title. And if anybody had asked me to summarise the whole thing… well.

But this book was too good to let go of so easily. There’s something in here that seems profound. So I sat down and started to go back through the whole thing again. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

A possible summary of the book

A common view of different early Bronze age civilisations (e.g. Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Harappans) isolated from each other and strange, will not help anybody understand the past. For these civilisations lived in a world of commerce and trade, occasionally between each other but more often with the raw materials suppliers that they shared.

What civilizations such as Mesopotamia managed to do was to encourage long-distance trade, even if those at the top of the pile were unaware of exactly how it worked in detail.

In the city

Cities were places that controlled trade routes, imported raw materials and made more complicated stuff (e.g. high quality bronze) out of it, much of this for export. They were located in just the right places and they had large skilled and unskilled workforces to do the work.

To counter fluctuations in supply and demand, city elites had effective systems of storing wealth in trusted places such as temples, acting rather like modern banks. This wealth could either be of a local type, like grain, or of a higher value, exotic type, such as prized metals, cedar wood and rare stones, such as lapis.

The elites didn’t really know where the exotic goods came from, just that they were coming in from distant mountains to the north or east or south or west. As far as they understood these mountains were sacred and the wealth they contained was god given or even god like.

So to construct a ‘god’ out of this sacred wealth was to actually create the god by putting together his sacred components. The god of the city was literally there, in the temple. But the god was also a sort of advert for the ‘Bank of XXX’, the ultimate, non-tradeable trade-item, to be cherished and cared for.

At the periphery

At the other end of the scale, those on the margins of civilisation, the raw materials producers, imported luxury, crafted goods of trusted provenance such as bronze or bronze items from the Mesopotamian cities in return for the raw materials that they produced.

So, in effect, these marginal producers bought into a system where they continued to export raw materials to the cities and continued to get newer versions of those trusted, crafted goods in return. The old goods they would dispose of by ritual burial. Thus the economic system could be maintained.

Discussion

Clearly this is not a full, nor necessarily correct, understanding of David Wengrow’s book. I have interpolated much. There is much that I could not use, such as the details of differing cultural practice between Egypt and Mesopotamia resulting from their different histories.

Also I was not entirely clear about the final section of the book where he discusses and disputes the common interpretation of the Middle East as a debased nursery for our modern civilisation, a prejudice that he seems to say comes from our jettisoning of kingship.

However, the ideas that I took away from this little gem more than make up for the book’s ambiguities and are, at least in part, probably because of them.

So thank you, David Wengrow, for being an archaeologist who can achieve something rare in your field. You have written a book which is a thoroughly enjoyable read, whatever you meant to say.

Reference

Wengrow, D. 2010 What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West, Oxford, pp217.

Did the dawn of agriculture lead to a form of human artificial selection resulting in more passive, less suspicious individuals? Isn’t this a bit like domesticating animals?

When I first read of the influential archaeologist Ian Hodder’s ideas about the ‘domestication of the mind’, I couldn’t help thinking “eh?”

What Prof. Hodder was trying to do was to explain an apparent paradox at the dawn of farming. This is that for the average Palaeolithic individual, the disadvantages of hard work and lowered nutrition resulting from farming seem to outweigh its advantages. So why would they ever have taken up farming at all?

Ian Hodder essentially argued that farming was only possible because humans had been ‘trained’ to accept it. This was not the training of a Machiavelli-figure but a kind of group training. Once people were on-side about the concept of “that is wild and dangerous” and “this is tame and homely” it was easy to make them take up farming. This seemed like so much mumbo jumbo to me.

So I forgot about Prof. Hodder and his ideas. I wanted a better reason than that for why people took up farming. I came up, for better or worse, with trade. Of course, this turns out to be as unproveable as domestication of the mind.

Yet something recently has caused me to go back to Ian Hodder’s idea and look at it again. I have a feeling that ‘domestication of the mind’ and trade are not incompatible.

Meet the ancestors

It’s difficult to know what the normal habits of a Palaeolithic forager were. The clues – paintings and carvings of animals, as well as rather odd shaped, generally faceless women – don’t help much.

Some of these foragers were clearly great artists. Whatever, I still don’t think that I would have enjoyed an encounter with most of them. Generally they were probably distrustful of strangers to the point of extreme violence and killing. I suspect that our first meeting might have been nasty, brutish and short, at least for me.

Of course, at the time there may have been evolutionary advantages to this suspicious and agressive behaviour. A new foraging group in your territory would be competitors for the animals and plants that you saw as your own. Killing or scaring them away would seem the best option.

Our modern tendency to cooperate with most strangers, both at work and on the street, would have been incomprehensible to our Palaeolithic ancestors. Books such as ‘The Company of Strangers’ have long made the case that what humans have become in the twenty first century is a long way from where we started.

Love thine enemy

Yet this cannot have been the whole story. Genetic health requires that Palaeolithic clan groups must have brought in women (or men) from other groups to produce healthy and viable offspring.

Also the style of art known as Gravettian managed to spread across a large area of Europe about 25,000 years ago. If there had been excessive hostility between groups then it would have been impossible to generate and spread this pan-European art style. In fact, it would have been impossible to spread any of the innovations made by humans during the Palaeolithic.

So I’d guess that, yes, humans were more suspicious than they are now. However, there must have been groups or individuals that were less suspicious and, conversely, groups or individuals that were more so.

Neolithic trade and gambling

As Matt Ridley would no doubt tell you, the growth in trade over the last ten or so millennia has been pretty much exponential. Yes, there have been downturns, but overall the pattern is one way.

Trade has always been a gamble, but it’s much less risky than it used to be. For example, shipping crates of bananas from Surinam to Holland, you can be fairly sure that nothing’s going to sink your ship and that the bananas won’t go rotten during the journey.

Compare this with the gamble for any Palaeolithic individual wishing to make contact with another group just to swap stones. Her thoughts would probably be “What are the odds that I’m going to get through this with my life?” I could imagine it would’ve made her a bit jumpy.

The growth of Earth’s population, like trade, has also grown exponentially. But the population that has enjoyed this growth probably didn’t include the suspicious, highly violent end of the Palaeolithic human spectrum.

For when people first started to trade with others there would be an understandable desire to lower the risk and trade with the less dangerous groups or individuals. The suspicious and aggressive groups would have been shunned as just too risky to trade with.

Additionally, the advent of farming meant that it was possible to have more than one clan group living in the same area. This meant that there was no evolutionary advantage in being that suspicious.

Domesticating animals and humans

It seems reasonable to compare the situation above with the domestication of animals.

Archaeologists have long wanted to understand the way in which animals were first domesticated. However, twentieth century Soviet experiments with wild silver foxes showed how it is possible to get rapid results with artificial selection.

Animals in these experiments were selected or rejected according to their aggression levels. Aggressive animals would be culled when young. The small percentage of passive animals would live to reproduce. After 30 or so generations the experiments had managed to produce tame silver foxes.

When people were first domesticatng animals there was an evolutionary advantage to having herds with genetic diversity, but that also didn’t fight each other. Therefore the same selection methods as for silver foxes were probably used.

For humans, it is possible that the first traders and farmers followed a similar, though not identical strategy. By avoiding contact with suspicious and agressive groups they would control their own breeding patterns. By expanding their populations through farming they could outcompete the rest. As time went on, the farming population, relatively passive and accommodating, would outgrow the non-farming population.

Discussion

There are many factors that haven’t been taken into account above. I have not discussed the physical factors driving continued evolution, such as the role of disease in densely packed populations. Also, I would never dream of arguing for an entirely passive and money grabbing population created by trade and farming. There’s plenty of evidence to contradict that.

But I think that ignoring the role of artificial selection on the thinking of early farming communities is to miss something important. I think it also opens up the possibility that early farming populations were ripe for exploitation by cunning and aggressive nomad or forager populations once the technological conditions were right.

Either way, I think that Ian Hodder was on to something. Humans have been domesticated. However, this is probably not by training, as Hodder suggested, but by the only method that’s been shown to work, artificial selection.

References

Hodder, I. 1990 The Domestication of Europe, Oxford/Blackwell, pp331.

Ridley, M. 2010 The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Fourth Estate, pp448.

Seabright, P. 2005 The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, Princeton, pp320.

Trut, L.N. 1999 Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment, American Scientist 87, p160-169.

Unknown author 2011 Modern Makeover, New Scientist 2804, p36-39 (http://www.newscientist.com)

The fate of prehistoric Easter Island was an environmental catastrophe… but was it really, as Jared Diamond argues, in isolation? Perhaps Easter Islanders were trading both with other Pacific islands and with South America.

In Jared Diamond’s bestseller, Collapse, Prof. Diamond outlined various examples of environmental over-exploitation, including Viking Greenland, the Maya of central America and modern Rwanda. But his first example, Easter Island (aka Rapanui), was his ace.

The collapse of Easter Island

Easter Island is less than 15 miles long and is sited in one of the most isolated parts of the Pacific, lying 1300 miles east of the nearest inhabited island, Pitcairn, and 2300 miles west of the coast of South America.

Jared Diamond used the work of John Flenley and Paul Bahn to argue that Easter Island is a microcosmic metaphor for our modern world. Isolated from all other human life, it typifies what humans can do to destroy themselves when their resources are limited and over-exploited. We, like the Easter Islanders of prehistory, are bound for disaster unless it can only think ahead.

From the evidence that Diamond could gather he told the following story:

Easter Island was first inhabited around 900AD or a little earlier. The population gradually expanded then ballooned. Every inch of the island was farmed, the trees were all felled and the wildlife eaten. The population during this time may well have exceeded 15,000. This was probably the time when Easter Islanders erected their famed statues, the ‘moai’.

But soil erosion and depletion lead to decline. By the seventeenth century Easter Island was in a permanent state of warfare. When the first recorded European account of Easter Island was made in 1722 the population was reduced to perhaps 2000 people.

Diamond’s and rats’

Overall I don’t really have a problem with Diamond’s main story. Easter Island is clearly a wreck, it’s devastation probably caused by the arrival of people. But there have been some significant disagreements, particularly between Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo on the one hand, and the original researchers, Flenley and Bahn, on the other.

Hunt and Lipo firstly suggest that Easter island was not colonised until perhaps as late as the 13th century AD. While this has caused much argument between them and Bahn and Flenley, I suspect that Prof. Diamond wouldn’t be too concerned. For him this would only highlight the scale of the human disaster.

Hunt and Lipo also argue that imported rats were the main culprits for deforestation, preventing the regrowth of trees. Again, who brought the rats?

Perhaps the biggest criticism by Hunt and Lipo is that they say there is insufficient evidence for a population explosion of the proportions Bahn, Flenley and Diamond argue for. They estimate that population numbers were never much higher than about 3000 people.

The problem with either argument is that it’s difficult to prove what size of population existed before recorded history. So much devastation was wrought on the island’s population after the arrival of Europeans that it dwindled to almost nothing, making genetic studies difficult.

Sweet potatoes

To me a much more important issue is just how isolated Easter Island was during this time. Jared Diamond justifiably points out that there is no evidence of trade to or from the island. As an island it appears to have been entirely self-sufficient in food and tools (albeit stone ones).

However, there is one sentence in Diamond’s book that is worth quoting. “Easter’s crops were bananas, taro, sweet potato, sugarcane, and paper mulberry, typical Polynesian crops mostly of Southeast Asian origin.” Note the ‘mostly’. The one exception, the sweet potato, comes from the Americas.

Links to South America

The sweet potato, a tropical tuber (Ipomoea batatas), is thought to originate somewhere in Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. It was first cultivated there around or before 3000BC. By the first millennium its cultivation had spread east, around the Caribbean, and south, down the western spine of South America into Peru and Chile (see map)

The domestic form of the sweet potato cannot be grown from seed and has to be propagated by tuber cuttings (a bit like a some commercial varities of normal potato). It also gets killed by seawater. Yet it is grown widely across the tropical and sub-tropical Polynesian islands of the Pacific and appears to have been grown there since pre-Columbian times.

Perhaps most revealing is the sweet potato’s name, generally variants on the word ‘kumara‘ in Polynesian dialects (including Easter Island’s)%. If it had been brought by Spanish or other European sailors it would have had names reflecting that European origin, such as ‘batata‘, ‘kamote‘ or some such. However, the name is remarkably similar to a Quechua (Peruvian) name for the sweet potato, ‘k^humara‘.

Easter Island not isolated

Generally speaking, people such as Jared Diamond talk of the colonisation of Easter Island as a one off event, followed by isolation. Colonists took seventeen days to get there from Pitcairn (say) and thought ‘Well, that’s me done travelling.” No one else then followed them. Well perhaps this was so but…

Easter island is the most easterly of the Polynesian islands. Although just under 2300 miles from Chile (and just over 2300 miles to Peru) there is no Polynesian island nearer to either South America or, in fact, the Americas.

It is, admittedly, marginal. Hawaii, to the north, is slightly further away (2400 miles), it’s near point the California coast of North America. However, while Hawaiians may or may not have reached California in Pre-Columbian times, the prehistoric natives of the California coast, as far as anyone can tell, never grew sweet potatoes.

Map of the southwest Pacific, showing a possible connection between Easter Island and South America.

Evidence presented by Henri Dumont and others also argues for an influx of pollen from other South American plant species into Easter Island, perhaps between the 14th and 16th centuries. This indicates some sort of South American connection.

To me the evidence of the sweet potato and the pollen is almost unequivocal (that’s the best I’m ever prepared to say). Easter island may not be ideally located for importing the sweet potato into the Polynesian world but there’s pretty much no other choice.+ However minor, Easter Island had some form of contact with South America.

But equally importantly, if Easter Island was the place to get the sweet potato first then its spread throughout the Polynesian islands indicates some form of contact for Easter Island back to the rest of the Polynesian islands.

Following this logic, Easter Island was not isolated. In fact it may have been a bottleneck or pinchpoint on the only route between the Pacific Islands and South America. All boat traffic would end up stopping at Easter Island.

Not Thor Heyerdahl

Chimu mask from Peru

If there were any connection between South America and Easter Island it would probably have been with the coast of Peru or Chile. The linguistic evidence suggests Peru.

The period of contact would perhaps have been from 900 or 1200 AD, when the Polynesians first arrived, and the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, when the Spanish took control of Peru. According to Jo Anne Van Tillburg, radiocarbon dates suggest a florescence of culture in Easter island between the mid 14th century and the beginning of the 16th century (added 3/8/11).

In the north of Peru the Moche culture  had given way to the Sicàn state and Chimú ‘empire’ by this time. These in turn lasted until around 1470AD when the coast was absorbed into the Inca empire. This fell to the Spanish around the 1530s.

I am not proposing the colonisation and diffusion of civilisation to Easter Island from South America. Nor am I proposing the opposite. Yes, there are similarities between the extended ears of Easter Island statues and Chimú and Sicàn gold masks from Peru but this is arguably a coincidence.

Furthermore the (admittedly limited) DNA evidence indicates that prehistoric Easter island never experienced a great influx of South Americans, even if there was an influx of South American pollen around the 14th century. So whatever the connection between Easter and South America, it could never have been huge.

So what am I arguing for?

The unlikely voyage of Tupa Inka Yupanki

There is an Inca legend, luckily recorded in 1572 by a Spanish explorer of South America, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. It tells of the great Inca leader Tupa Inka Yupanki who was fascinated by the merchant sailors arriving on the Peruvian coast, bringing gold from islands out in the western sea.

So Tupa Inka sailed west, supposedly around 1480, with a great fleet of balsas to the islands of Avachumbi and Ninachumbi. He was gone almost a year, but when he returned he brought back ‘black’ people, gold, a brass chair and bits of a horse.

Most of this story is likely to be nonsense. The items listed were unavailable on the Pacific islands. Indeed, Tupa Inka would have had to sail to the other side of the world to collect any of these items.

However, the story may be a folk memory of distant islands to the west and of merchant sailors coming from those islands. Was this a genuine memory of an earlier time? Was it instead something arising from a desire for the indigenous people to have a sailing history equal in magnitude to that of the Spanish? Who knows.

Light trade?

This is where I push the data too far and potentially fall flat on my face. What if there were once Polynesian merchants bringing something highly prized to the shores of Peru from the Pacific Islands?

Well, as already stated, there’s no evidence for Easter Island trade, either between South America or the other Polynesian islands. Easter island was largely self sufficient in tools. There are, of course, good reasons for that lack of trade. It would have been unlikely that anybody would have bothered to carry stone tools or pots such vast distances either to or from Easter Island because they are heavy and you could make them yourself.

But I have one chance. What if the trade was in something really light and easily transportable but something that, given time, would rot away, leaving no evidence. Something really light… as light, indeed, as a feather.

Luxury feathers

Gold 'feather' headdress from Sican culture, Peru

One of the major trade items of both Mesoamerica and South America was feathers – red feathers, green feathers, irridescent feathers of all kinds. Just think native American headdress. Some were just valued, others were as prized as gold, if not more so. Feathers could be a high status item, a king’s trade good.

Feathers were also highly valued in Polynesian society. The red feathers of, for example, the Scarlett Honeyeater, were a significant form of currency in Santa Cruz and neighbouring islands. Jared Diamond himself points out the significance to Polynesians of feathers twice in Collapse, making the often argued point that the red scoria discs (pukao) on the top of some Easter Island statues probably represented red feather headdresses.

David Steadman has stated that something like twenty percent of all Pacific bird species went extinct in the period between the Polynesian colonists arrival and the subsequent arrival of European ships. This effect may well have been due to the predations of rats on bird eggs.* However, David Houson suggests that a significant part of this may have been due to the feather trade.

In this light the example of Henderson Island, discussed by Jared Diamond in Collapse, is intriguing. As Diamond points out, Henderson Island is difficult to live on. It has almost no fresh water and the ground is uplifted coral, almost impossible to farm.

Yet in pre-Colombian times it contained a small resident population of people who eked out a living there, even managing to import high quality tools from other, relatively nearby islands. The island’s middens are dominated by masses of bird bones. Were bird feathers an exported trade item? Were they in fact the main reason why people lived on the island at all?

Is there just the remotest possibility that these two societies, those of South America and of the Pacific Islands, somehow met and traded in such things as feathers?

The collapse of civilisation

Diamond argues for the collapse of societies on the Polynesian Islands of Henderson and Pitcairn around 1450 AD or a little later. He also argues for the collapse of Easter Island society around 1600AD. Jo Anne Van Tillburg argues for a peak around 1500 AD with a collapse sometime shortly after (added 3/8/11).

For comparison, the collapse of Inca civilisation in South America followed the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas. The Spanish invaded the Inca heartland in 1532 and the final phase of Inca control dates to around 1538. However, smallpox was probably already hitting the west coast of South America by this time. So overall the collapse occurred during the first half of the sixteenth century.

Is there a link between these events? Could the collapse of Inca civilisation have, in some way, caused the collapse of the Easter, Henderson and Pitcairn societies?

If there was pre-Colombian trade between Easter and South America the arrival of the Spanish provides a convenient point for it to stop. The new economic conditions in the mid sixteenth century could have been enough on their own. Alternatively, smallpox or some other infection could have caused trade to cease.^

Environmentally sound?

I have no idea whether the case I’ve put forward above is reasonable. Whatever,  I’m sure that the destruction of natural habitats like Easter Island’s really did have a major effect on the people who lived there. I think it ultimately left them isolated.

But in fact pretty much everything that people the world over have done since they started trading and farming has had negative environmental consequences. Every field opened up is a reduction in biodiversity. Every precious item collected involved digging holes in the ground or the pointless killing of animals and plants.

Yet people everywhere, not just on on Pacific islands, have achieved something amazing since the start of the Neolithic Revolution. They’ve managed to wreak all this damage but somehow manipulate the odds so far in their favour that there are more of them now than ever before.

So what impresses me, as it does all of civilisation, is not that people wrecked Easter Island. It’s that they, like us, have managed to survive what they’ve done.

Notes

% The following are words for sweet potato – In Peru – cumara, kumar, kumal; In Ecuador, kumara, cumar’, umar’; In
Colombia - umala, kuala;  On Easter Island and New Zealand - kumara, On the Marquesas – kuma’a; On Aitutaki - ku’ara; On Tahiti – umara; On Tonga and Fiji – kumala. (from here)

+Some people have suggested a direct route from the Marquesas or Societies Islands to South America. To me this view seems surprising as the distance to be travelled would then be at least 3800 miles.

* The volcanic Galapagos Islands have been lucky. All the evidence suggests the occasional rare visit from South Americans in Pre-Columbian times. However, there is no evidence of the presence of Polynesians, or their rats. This is why the island is such an important nature reserve.

^It would have been possible to transmit smallpox to Easter Island by boat from South America at this time. However, the epidemic of the 1860s perhaps suggests that the population hadn’t developed immunity to it so maybe they’d never experienced it before.

References

Adelaar, W.F.H. 1998 The name of the sweet potato: a case of pre-conquest contact between South America and the Pacific.  In: Janse, M. et al. Productivity and creativity: studies in general and descriptive linguistics in honor of E.M. Uhlenbeck, Mouton de Gruyter. p403-412.

Brander, J. A. & Taylor, S. M. 1988 The Simple Economics of Easter Island: A Ricardo-Malthus Model of Renewable Resource Use, The American Economic Review 88, p119-138.

Dumont, H. J. et al. 1998 The end of moai quarrying and its effect on Lake Rano Raraku, Easter Island, Journal of Paleolimnology 20, p409-422.

(This paper suggests the arrival of South American pollen in Easter Island around second half of 14th century. It also argues that Moai quarrying stopped at the same time. It suggests Pre-Columban trade links between the Incas and Easter Island.)

Gibson, A.C. Economic Botany – Sweet Potato page

Haemig, P.D. 1978 Aztec Emperor Auitzotl and the Great-Tailed Grackle, Biotropica 10, p11-17.

Houston, D.C. 2010 The Impact of Feather Currency on the Population of the Scarlet Honeyeater on Santa Cruz. In: Tideman, S. & Gosler, A. Ethno-Ornithology, Birds, Indigenous Peoples, Culture and Society, p 55-66.

Hunt, T. L. 2006 Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island, American Scientist 94, p412.

Hunt, T.L. & Lipo, C.P. 2006 Late Colonisation of Easter Island, Science 311, p1603-1606.

Hunt, T.L. & Lipo, C.P. 2007 Chronology, deforestation, and “collapse:” Evidence vs. faith in Rapa Nui prehistory. RapaNui Journal, 21, p85-97.

Markham, C. 1907 Translation of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s History of the Incas.

Steadman, D.W. 1995. Prehistoric Extinctions of Pacific Island Birds: Biodiversity Meets Zooarchaeology, Science 267, p1123-1131.

Photos from Sheep”R”us‘ photostream, Britannica Online Encylopedia,

Additional References

Gunn, B.F., Baudouin, L. & Olsen, K.M. 2011 Independent Origins of Cultivated Coconut (Cocos nucifera L.) in the Old World Tropics, PLoS One (online)

Another additional argument, pointing out that coconuts were probably taken to northwestern South America by Polynesians in Pre-Colombian times. The dates they suggest, around 200-300BC, are perhaps a little early, but…

Van Tillburg, J. A. 2011 The Easter Island Statue Project, University of Pennsylvania Podcast, Itunes U (see also EISP website)

Gives approximate dates for statue development and also discusses the structure of society during their building.